Member Management

[rpoelking]

Often users will switch email accounts after they have subscribed to a forum. Is there anyway that you can add a feature where when I discover that a member account is using an invalid email address that I can deactivate (not ban or delete) that account. When that person attempts to log in they are requested to enter their current email address and re-activate the account according to the administrator's preferences?

[MrCue]

Admin --> Features and Options --> "Email new password on email change"

I believe this is what your looking for.

[rpoelking]

No. That's not it exactly. That's only if the end user changes the email in their profile which is what you hope they would do on their own when they change their email. I'm talking about the users that forget to do that and you discover (perhaps by a mass emailing you send out as an administrator) that several addresses are bad. I want to go in, find those accounts and deactivate the account. When that user returns and logs in, I want them forced to update the proper email account and then re-activate the account per the administrators preferences. For example, I ususally select the user activated account via clicking the activation link in the email sent to them.

I hope that's clearer.

[MrCue]

I dont think you can confirm if an email address exists beyond checking that the domain is reachable.

[rpoelking]

No...that's not what I'm asking either. If I send any email out to a bad account (the account does not exist anymore), I will ususally get it bounced back to me. That's enough for me to know the email address is bad. If that was one of my members email address, I would want them to correct that as soon as possible.

This happens all the time and it is not necessarily a malicious act. Many times it's well meaning people that have busy livew and don't have time (or recollection) of every place they need to update email addresses. This is just a means of prompting them if we have discovered that an address is not good.

Another possiblility is that the Admin can set a period of time in which the user is required to update their profile to be sure the account settings are current. Kind of like what PayPal does (except they do it too much).

[Anguz]

rpoelking, I know exactly what you're talking about. I don't know if there's a feature for that yet, but would certainly be a nice one or mod. It's been so long since I managed my last forum, that I had forgotten about how needed this is.

[[Unknown]]

How would you propose SMF tell if the email address:

[email protected]

Is still valid?  In this case, Hotmail does provide a service (of a sort) to find out if it exists, but... simplemachines.org does not.  How would you propose finding out if an email @simplemachines.org is valid?

-[Unknown]

[Anguz]

He's not asking for SMF to know when the email address is not valid. He'll know when an email sent by SMF is returned as undelivered to him. What he wants is for SMF to have a way to make an account have to be updated the next time the member logs in to the forum. When the person comes to the forum, he's asked to update his profile's email address and after saving the change, SMF will email the person an activation link to make sure the address is good. Did I get that right, rpoelking?

[[Unknown]]

Sorry, I read the later posts... and only skimmed the first one.

I guess that is fairly reasonable, but it won't happen for 1.0.

-[Unknown]

[Fizzy]

So instead of an email bouncing back to admin it would be received by SMF, the Member_ID serched for, identified and then in some way tagged so that the next time they log in they get redirected to their profile together with a "Please update your email" message?
That would certainly save me having to go in to members profiles, turn off notifications etc
I quote like the sound of that as a mod

[rpoelking]

Well, there you go. My contribution was a feature no one had requested before.  I totally understand it not making 1.0. That's a relatively major request I'm sure and 1.0 is nearly complete.

[henken]

That´s a good suggestion rpoelking. That´s something i´m also searching for but which is currently missing. That option would also help to keep a good forum clean and lean from junk accounts (register and forget). Would be a pleasure if someone is able to make such a feature or enhancement to a next release of this great board

[[Unknown]]

So instead of an email bouncing back to admin it would be received by SMF

No, this is not possible on most servers, I'm afraid.  That would have to be a mod.

-[Unknown]

[Ben_S]

Agree it should be a mod, though it is possible on a lot of servers, servers running cPanel let you set up piping through the cpanel mail forwarders interface.

[[Unknown]]

Agree it should be a mod, though it is possible on a lot of servers, servers running cPanel let you set up piping through the cpanel mail forwarders interface.

If you said that to more than 50% of SMF's users, they'd go... "huh?"  That's not really a simple thing to do .

But, I know you know this and agree with me...

-[Unknown]

[rpoelking]

HUH? 

[TarantinoArchives]

I have similar problems.
With so many users, there's a huge percentage of people who just have invalid email adresses. They just got invalid during the time. for example people who signed up years ago before i migrated to SMF. now their email provider doesnt exist anymore. so i dont even have the chance to email them because their adress is invalid. i think next to the "registration manager" should be another option that would allow SMF to list members where it says "last active: NEVER". after you have all those in the list, you click a checkbox like "remind user" or whatever, and then you click send. SMF then checks if those you reminded come back. if they are still "inactive" after a set period, lets say 2 months, SMF suggest to the admin that the accounts could be deleted because they are inactive.

how's that?

[blark]

G'day,

We actually have a related problem. People with now invalid
email addresses, if they have things such as email notification
for PMs turned on were having the mail bounce to the address
of the user that the web server was running under. Of course,
the admins of the system became slightly annoyed by this (we
have over a thousand users in our implementation, and of course
a fair percentage of them had their email addresses become
invalid.

We're using 'sendmail' for the mail. Despite the fact that Sub-Post.php
adds a "Reply-To: " header, sendmail was adding another one
as the user of the webserver, and more or less ignoring the first
one. I don't know why.

Anyway, the admin of the server looked at the code, and insisted
that the correct thing to do is to add a "-fadmin.address.of.board"
as a 5th parameter of the
if (!mail(strtr($to, array("\r" => '', "\n" => '')), $subject, $message, $headers)) line in Subs-Post.php

It fixed the problem, and made them happy, but we'd like a
better fix other than changing the code. Perhaps as a setting to
use -f if needed?


Any comments?

[[Unknown]]

They should be able to add things like that to php.ini or use .htaccess/httpd.conf.

-[Unknown]

[blark]

They should be able to add things like that to php.ini or use .htaccess/httpd.conf.

-[Unknown]

Err, thanks, for the reply, but if you could be a little more specific, we'd
stand a lot better chance of getting it done. Mainly because I don't
understand how one would get our specific email address in there.

Is it something that we can set up locally for just our forum set up
without bothering the admins of the server?

I suppose it's time to go hunting for some php manuals on line!